Dev Diary: A look into the world of Plodshore Island
Ahoy, reader! If you’re seeing this, you probably know that we’re in the middle of brewing up a swashbuckling pirate adventure.
In our last newsletter, we talked a bit about Material10, Frag Games & Jinnbyte; the teams we’re working with to develop and publish Plodding Isles. In this update, we’re going to dive a little further into what we’ve been working on together. We’ve been really excited to let you in on some of our in-development game art and footage, and we’re even more excited about new teasers that are just around the corner.
On paper, Plodding Isles: Mini began life as a retro-inspired 16-bit* pixel art game. After months of pre-development and planning, it soon became clear that our shared vision for the game needed a bigger boat. Having fleshed out the scope of the game exponentially, it came to a point where a higher-fidelity art-style game would better convey the huge vision for our lore and world.
*16-bit and 32-bit are largely hangovers from a bygone age of 16 and 32-bit game development, but the terms are loosely still used to describe differing fidelity levels.
After much toying around between the old pre-development art style of Plodding Isles: Mini and various new directions (shown above) we decided to take our more whimsical concept art — inspired by classic games in the Legend of Zelda series, among others — and scale it up, give it superpowers and blast it over to our development team to bring to life.
We’re really excited to have a talented team of artists that thrive on building the assets for our game’s world from an art-first point of view. While it’s not the case for all, some pixel art-based games don’t quite hit the visual mark because they’ve crafted the pixel assets from scratch. We’re creating our assets through a series of hand-sketched concepts, before building their final pixel-art equivalents for Plodshore Island:
We’ve also spent a huge amount of time developing our lore and character interactions. Our lore deck, a publicly-available document outlining the expansive backstory and universe of Plodding Isles, will be published at ploddingisles.io for everyone to view.
You can see a pre-release snippet of some of our complex character and journey interactions below, and we’ll be releasing teasers and more info about this before our full deck is publicly available.
In our November update, we’ll be showcasing gameplay from the beach on Plodshore Island, some interesting enemies, and exciting new art from the Plodding Isles universe.
Have something you want to see more of? Let us know in the comments or pop up in Discord. We love to hear from you all!
